Poetry 

Has the power to polish life

The world 

A fingernail brighter 

Enough to bring the sparkle out in your eye 

Draw your attention to the ravenings of your mad heart 

Enough even to highlight the flashlight shining from another mad heart 

But your insanity could be playing pretend with your brain 

Only the comets know what is real. 

Oh god I want to create 

And I want to live life I 

Want to be bright and fast and streak across the sky on fire

Madly happy

In love 

Laughing 

I want to get out of my own skin 

I want to burn away my bones 

And supernova my heart

Explosion of emotion 

I want to wrap myself in the cords of vulnerability and affection 

Honest to goodness 

I want to smile with firelight in my eyes 

No more polite grins

Stretched thin, 

Blue

And empty. 

I want to unfold my wings 

And take off, 

See the whole world in true clarity 

And heart breaking color. 

What am I? 

Nothing. 

What will anyone remember? 

What does anyone remember now? 

A lunatic,

Crazed, perhaps? 

She tore down the mirror with hand-tipped claws.

A /mono/ possibly, /Mona/

Up the tree, a little tipped in the brain, 

Simple. 

Or even a red star burning out, 

Terrible and sublime (sub-lime) for a while, 

But in the end, 

Quite disappointing. 

I really am nothing that is thought of me, 

Only a hollow voice and a thirsty ego. 

A little too eager to please, 

But soul-dehydrating fearful of 

Falling short of all of your expectations. 

I would like to see with eyes unclouded 

Clearly, truly

At my best, 

I am lucky, 

a star smiled gently upon me 

But really I'm just mediocre 

Ochre

Ocre

Nothing at all 

But a small heart 

Trying to grow through the cracks 

In the sidewalk 

Towards a sun 

A billion miles away. 

Egomaniac

If I am left to my own devices for too long
The world whirls out of focus,
I lose my balance

My mind
my mind chatters away,
Digging a hole to hide in

No reason why,
Only that I am paranoid,
and a narcissist,
and I'm not entirely sure I am lovable,
deserve to be loved
at the same time that I believe
Everyone should love me. 

Feck

Damn everything.

I'm listening to Leonard Cohen, I read the New Yorker article about his death this morning.

I drank jasmine tea, understeeped while eating oatmeal and reading "Walk Two Moons".

This thesis won't write itself, but there are other things calling, other things neglected in the neglecting of it.

Leonard's muse. My muse, I don't really have a muse, but I have a twinkle star that won't come to my fingers, eludes my veins.

Deeply feeling, do you suppose? Or just a twisted column, kinked towards the bottom?

Damn everything with a fork and spoon, my life will probably sputter out, ghost promises and cobweb hopes.

The Cripple of Inishmaan, brutal and sweet and cruel, feeds some of this, perhaps. Bitter.

All of the words that 

Want to come out of me 

Have already been said before 

Redundancies and cliches 

Slithering from my typing fingers 

A hollow voice repeating, chirruping anxiously. 

It's just that 

I want to love-

want to be loved.

But I become a hurricane if I see 

A drizzle.

Instead of a fairytale mermaid, 

Languidly brushing her hair on the rocks,

I am a siren, and my song is sublime and terrible. 

Galadriel when tempted by the ring, 

Perhaps a thing of ugliness and repulsion-

When all I want is to be by your side, 

And have you at mine. 

But really, I am none of those things 

I am a girl, ordinary, awkward.

At a point in time where my life 

Has intersected yours 

And I hear a song from your heart that I like, 

I am drawn to the light in your eyes. 

Maybe this is nothing, or maybe it is everything. 

All I ask is:

Can we walk together a little while? 

Why is my heart a 

Black hole? My mind a windy 

field of barley. 

I am not so sad 

As the waterfall world, but 

I want to wail. 

Final for Intaglio Printmaking!

Love Song to Inertia

The main focus of  “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” is the tension of inertia. Throughout the poem, Prufrock poises upon the edge of taking action or formulating an opinion, but time and time again, he backs down and drifts away on his underwhelming train of thought. This inaction is supported by TS Eliot’s use of repetition, imagery, and a nontraditional rhyming pattern. 

            Repetition in the poem helps to tie the stream of consciousness style of writing together, threading the entire thing together and uniting it with repeating questions and echoing lines.  The protagonist of the poem constantly asks, “Do I dare?” (676) about some unnamed action, and never really states whether he dares or not. Prufrock also asks variations of “How should I presume?” (676), somewhat echoing the thought of “Do I dare?” (676). In addition to these almost direct line repetitions, several lines are referenced or shuffled and rewritten at the ends of stanzas. For example, “If one, settling a pillow by her head,/Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all.’” (677) and “If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,/And leaning toward the window, should say:/ ‘That is not it at all,/ That is not what I meant, at all.’” This restructuring of previous lines in the poem is a particularly clever way to retain continuity in an otherwise fractured stream of consciousness piece. 

            The poem’s use of imagery reinforces the theme of stillness and inaction. The first stanza introduces the inaction with the lines “When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table;” (675) This line, though strange and dissonant if you think about it too hard, immediately conveys a feeling of lethargy and inactivity. The reader is thus prepared for a long, dreamlike collection of images and phrases that slowly build and then contract throughout the poem like the deep, passive breathing of a tranquilized patient. This sleepy image is reinforced throughout the poem, with lines like “And seeing it was a soft October night,/[the fog] curled once about the house and fell asleep” (675), and  “If one, settling a pillow beside her head,” (677). The poem’s theme of inaction is conveyed with sleepy and dreamlike imagery.

           Finally, the use of rhyme in the poem imitates the feeling of thought, bouncing up and down then trailing off. Throughout the poem, the pattern of rhyme bounces from line to line, then falls dead before being picked up again.  There is no constant abab pattern of rhyme; more often than not the pattern is aabbcaa, or aabacdefe. The rhyming flits about at its own discretion, rhyming some lines, then not others, and then rhyming two lines in a row. Both rhyming and non-rhyming lines carry the poem forward and create pauses after stanzas. An erratic thought process, or a state of dreaming are brought to mind by the pattern of rhyming, further conveying a feeling of inaction. 

            The poem “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” seems to mainly focus on a feeling of inertia, while the protagonist leads up to and down from the question of “Do I dare?”. Prufrock never comes to a decision, merely allowing his thoughts to trail off. He avoids taking action, choosing to stay still at the brink of acting. All of the elements of the poem including its use of imagery, repetition, and rhyme, help to convey the tension and release of inaction.

Abcarian, Richard, Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen. Literature: The Human Experience. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013. Print. 675-777

Climb the Tree, Come Down Only for Green Mangoes

The eyes of my heart were broken
on the continent's brow.
Flash of yellow light, stars
and the world was outlined in red
and yellow, bright blue and salmon walls.
Pounded down by a waterfall,
strong enough to stay standing.
Wore me down and built me up,
little sandcastle human,
shaped by the branches that reminded
me of my own softness.
Surrounded by new colors, I forgot
what my own shell looked like.
Sycophant, the outside reflected the inside
reflecting self of surroundings.
A continuous, silver song
White on white
on blue on verdant on saffron
Goldenrod azul.
Butterfly, blue. 

A Realization

I was somehow lucky enough to visit Colombia for ten days this Spring.
While I was there, I was completely floored by the absolute beauty of the countryside and the cities of Medellín and Santa Fe de Antioquia. I am but a small desert girl, and being surrounded by all of that greenery was absolutely breathtaking. The flowers were everywhere, blooming from bushes and trees, flashes of orchids in the mountains and gardens in the cities. The color quenched and awakened a thirst in my eyes.
I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to stand being back home, in the mud and grayness of Winter giving way to Spring.
Surprisingly, a film had been washed from my eyes in Colombia, and I looked at my landscape with clear vision. The beauty here, so different from Colombia, pierced my heart just the same, and I discovered just how much I love this landscape. The wild trees in my valley, rocky mountain juniper and cedar, may be shorter, stockier, and less lush than those in Colombia, but they are still so beautiful. The blue-grey, scaly fields of sage, low to the ground feel like home.
Don't get me wrong, though, there are desert landscapes in Colombia too, around drought and just normally dry areas near the mountains of Antioquia. I saw cacti there taller than what grows close and nearly invisible to the ground in the hills of my valley.
The spring flowered here, sweeter smelling than Colombia, absolutely white on campus as the trees donned gowns of popcorn balls all along the sidewalk. The black locusts in my backyard were blooming until just yesterday, when the tiny, orchid-like flowers began to fade and flutter to the ground, spent.
I wasn't able to truly appreciate the beauty of my home until I traveled to Colombia, and experienced a land incredibly beautiful, in many many ways. I cannot say that one is more beautiful than the other, but my experience of both has opened my eyes, and I love them dearly. 

Occupying space

Despite the assumption that Rosa parks suddenly decided to keep her seat on the bus and stand up to the tyranny of racism, the actual fact of the matter is that her decision was years in coming, and she had trained in activism for several years. For twelve years she helped to lead a chapter of the NAACP, and she had recently gone to a civil rights workshop.
This very much relates to something I've been thinking about lately. I very much admire people who I see as spontaneous, and public. Those videos of people messing around in airports? I think they look like fun, and I admire the courage and audacity of the people who perform and record them in public.
However, the other day, I realized that such things are not as out of the blue as they may seem. The people who create those videos of random acts of publicly strange behavior spend a lot of time in those places, they are comfortable in them and they understand how they work.
Rosa Parks spent a lot of time in the abstract space of activism and social change, so she felt when the time was right to keep her seat, she felt comfortable in her decision to own the space she was in.

In realizing all of this and linking it up, I realize that in order to inherit or develop the qualities of those I admire, I must first become comfortable in that space of activism, public connection, or private, instantaneous connection. 

Reader's Write Response: Immigrants

(Written for English 1010, Fall Semester.)

Some people think of their grandmothers. Others think of their parents or their friends. Some people even remember their own journeys as emigrants from their home countries. When I think of the word “Immigrant”, I think of the students I work with at my college’s English Skills Center.

They are all bright and quick to laugh, and they are all married, most of them are Mexican women with children to take care of and homes to clean. One is a married man with a job; he often has to leave early so he can go to work. A lady from Saudi Arabia attends as well; her husband is a Business student at the college. In addition to all of these people in my life right now, I also think of the little Mexican girl who lived next door to me when I was four. All we could do together was count, and say hola and adios. 

            To Jodie in the November 2008 issue of SUN Magazine’s Readers Write, Immigrant meant a colleague, Maria, who worked hard and gave back to everyone around her, but wasn’t allowed the same opportunities as many other people because she was living as an undocumented immigrant. Maria spoke Spanish and translated for visitors to a nonprofit associated with AmeriCorps, where Jodi was volunteering. Among the credentials given by Jodie, Maria also worked as a waitress while attending college full time and helping out with her siblings. Maria, had lived in the US for ten years, but she wasn’t a recorded citizen. Because of this, it was challenging to get her on a plane for a convention, but they eventually decided to show Maria’s student ID, and say that she hadn’t gotten her driver’s license yet. The plan worked, and Maria was able to attend and speak at the convention. After Maria graduated from university, she continued working at the same restaurant, getting paid under the table. Because Maria was undocumented, she wasn’t able to move on to Medical School.

            Judy Chow wrote about her experience growing up in Philadelphia after emigrating from Hong Kong with her family. She was two years old at the time, so her identity hadn’t been cemented as Chinese. After becoming accustomed to being surrounded by white people on her block and at school she would forget she was Asian as a child until she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. People would ask where she was from, and she would have to explain to them that she “was originally from China”. After moving to Virginia in her late thirties, she realized “‘Home’ may not be a place but a state of mind”.  She writes that she has begun to speak with a southern accent, and she forgets that she looks different from her Caucasian neighbors. Finally, she says, “There are days when my neighbors forget that I look “foreign, and I become just another person, colleague, friend.”

            Being an immigrant often means struggling with feeling different, possibly learning a new language, and becoming accustomed to a new culture and environment. Sometimes all of this can be very difficult, especially for school age children. Oliver French emigrated from Germany to Switzerland in 1933in the wake of the Nazi takeover of Germany and the boycott of Jewish businesses. At boarding school, Oliver didn’t speak the language, and found the other children’s customs strange. Because of the language barrier, the other children would try to get Oliver and his brother in trouble with dirty words and double entendres. In spite of the difficult period of assimilation, eventually the boys learned the language and became generally accepted by their classmates. As Oliver writes, “Some of the kids would still refer to us using slurs for Germans, but we no longer felt German. We were refugees from the Germans. We were immigrants.”

            The people who exemplify the word “immigrant” are often running away from turmoil or oppression in their home countries, like Oliver and the people involved in our modern Syrian refugee crisis. Just as often though, immigrants are moving toward something, a brighter future for their children or more opportunities than they are afforded in their home country. In doing so, they face a lot of hardship like the peril of traveling across a closed border or a wide ocean, or the difficulty of adjusting to a new culture and language. Most immigrants do their very best to make a living and a life in their new home.

Scars Are Supposed To Fade With Time

Seeing your truck three times 

In one night

Made my heart drop, deflated blue lead balloon

Straight to the bottom of my shoes, 

And then into the center of the earth.

What is left is a ghost, 

An echo of what you were to me for so long.

It's better that way.

Please stop reminding me that you're real.

Final Project for Relief Print Making